Editorial: A majority-vote budget? Not with this Legislature

Temptingly simple solutions can hold devilish unintended consequences. Proposition 25, which would make it easier for our paralyzed state Legislature to pass budgets, is one of those false fixes.

On its face, Proposition 25 seems like a natural response to the Legislature’s well-demonstrated inability to act in the face of the recent economic meltdown. The two latest budget deficits in California history came this year and in 2008. And the prolonged stalling only compounds the budget problems. If you’re overspending and running up debts, small adjustments can be huge money-savers over time. Delay and denial, on the other hand, are devastating.

Proposition 25 would clear one of the major roadblocks by scrapping the long-standing rule that the Legislature pass budgets by a two-thirds vote in each house; instead, a simple majority would do. The measure would not lower the threshold for raising taxes.

The basic effect would be that the majority party — the Democrats, now and seemingly forever — would not need to muster votes from the minority Republicans to help pass the budget. And that in itself isn’t such a horrifying concept.

The lawmakers in the majority ought to decide the state’s priorities. If they do a bad job, the voters can retire them.

In a vacuum, this would be a good idea — especially with the safeguard against raising taxes without broad legislative consensus.

But we don’t live in a vacuum, we live in California, where our political class has a record.

That record includes simply ignoring catastrophic problems in the hope that a federal bailout or an economic rebound will avert them.

Recent budget delays aren’t only or even mostly the fault of a holdout minority of Republicans; Democrats have simply been loathe to cut spending.

And what is to stop a simple majority of lawmakers from passing a “balanced” budget that in fact relies on inflated revenue assumptions, running up deficits, then demanding tax increases? That in fact already happens — it’s the case with the recent overdue budget — but without the check of the minority party, it would only be worse.

For residents of the north state, which has long elected Republicans in a Democratic state, Proposition 25 could prove especially painful. Now, the needs of Republican districts can at least get a passing hearing because the majority needs to corral a few GOP votes.

Would Democrats pay them the least attention otherwise? And would they suddenly discover spending cuts they could live with — in Republican districts — as a form of legislative arm-twisting to force tax increases?

The state government is plainly broken and needs a foundation-to-rooftop remodel. Simple-majority budgets work just fine in most states. As part of a broader constitutional overhaul, they might work for California, too.